Comments Update

Since 2021/02/27 my blog has had comments enabled courtesy of Staticman. Unfortunately it seems that the only comments I get are spam so I am torn as to whether to continue enabling comments or to remove them.

Just to be clear, I was not expecting to get hundreds of comments on my posts, far from it! I was however hoping to get the occasional insightful one from time to time.

Currently having comments doesn’t cause me too many headaches; every so often I check my GitHub for pull requests that comments come in as and delete the spam comments. But today I had to wrestle with a Ruby update breaking Jekyll on my local machine and it made me question whether I even need to use Jekyll to host my website and blog.

I could in theory resort to a simple Makefile to produce the HTML for all my blog posts and RSS feed. It would not be super complex; all my posts are written in Markdown and I can easily use pandoc or another tool to convert them to HTML and embed them in a template.
I’d lose out on all the Liquid templating that is supported by Jekyll but I mainly use that in the comments section, archive page, feed and a little bit in the layouts. All for things that I could more easily script with the shell. In actual fact some of what I do might be even better done in the shell as it would avoid some of the limitations of Liquid.

Overall losing comments might not be the worst thing in the world. If I want conversation over an idea I think it might be better to do so on a dedicated platform for that like Mastodon or even email. It might even be more in keeping with the Unix philosophy!